UK ISPs Secretly Expand “Futile” Pirate Bay Blockade

In April, the UK High Court ruled that several of the country’s leading ISPs must censor The Pirate Bay since the site and its users breach copyright on a grand scale.

In the weeks that followed Virgin Media, BT, Everything Everywhere, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, BE and O2 all blocked access to the world’s largest BitTorrent site. Several of the site’s IP-addresses and domain names were made inaccessible.

In a response The Pirate Bay decided to add some new IP-addresses, effectively bypassing the blockades. This worked, until this week when several ISPs updated their blocklists to include the new addresses.

In the UK the procedure to add new domains and IP-addresses is part of a ‘private agreement,’ which apparently allows the providers to quietly add new entries when it’s deemed necessary.

As of this week 194.71.107.82 and 194.71.107.83 are no longer accessible on Sky Broadband, Virgin Media and TalkTalk and possibly other providers as well. The new addresses were added quietly by all ISPs without notifying the public.

Whether the updated filter will have any effect has yet to be seen. The Pirate Bay wouldn’t be The Pirate Bay if they hadn’t already lined up a new address, and indeed they have. During the weekend the BitTorrent site will add 194.71.107.164 (not live yet) to keep the whack-a-mole game going.

A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they have enough new addresses to keep the providers busy for years to come. However, for them it’s more of a statement than anything else as there are already dozens of proxy sites that allow users to access The Pirate Bay just fine.

The above shows once again that while these blockades may stop some people from accessing a site, the really determined have plenty of options. Also, of those who simply give up on accessing The Pirate Bay, many will simply switch to other torrent sites.

Proof of the ineffectiveness of the censorship attempts was recently highlighted by several Dutch and UK Internet providers, who claimed that BitTorrent traffic didn’t decline after the blockades were implemented.

In other words, blocking The Pirate Bay is futile.

As we’ve concluded before, the entertainment industry might be better off pumping money into business models that give customers what they want, legally. The censorship route doesn’t seem to work out for now.